I was a fashion victim as a teenager but found it difficult to know whether the vision of cool that I believed I displayed was actually hitting the mark. On my way to the station one Saturday evening for a night in London an old boy, took one look at me and allowed disgust to register on his face. As I passed him he voiced his opinion that I was ‘pathetic’. I knew then I had just the look I was after.

Herein lies the secret of an effective hook, something to make the recipient of your direct email marketing campaign want to click on through.

It must be targeted precisely.

The hook is an offer, a prize, a bonus, something which is not available to just anyone, but is wrapped up for that specific person. So if you sell items for rugby training, such as weights and tackle suits, prize draw for tickets to an Elton John concert might well convince your customers that you don’t really know them.

So what bit of ‘haute couture’ might make your customers react just the way you want them to?

Information such as email newsletters is not necessarily the cheap option as it must have some intrinsic value to make it engage the recipient. For successful B2B email marketing your company could conduct some research that would be useful to your customers: Government incentives, tax breaks, trends in marketing, that sort of thing. The options are limited only by the knowledge of your customers’ needs. You don’t, of course, have to give everything away at once. Perhaps a link to the booking form for the seminar you are about to run or allow them to opt in to the email newsletter which, over the next few weeks and months, will go into more detail.

This can be further refined by allowing your customers special facilities. On-line magazines might have special ‘behind the scenes’ footage of, say, the pits at an F1 Grand Prix or an interview with the scorer of the goal which saved your team from relegation. And all this at no cost to them, apart from their email address of course. For those who sell furniture for doll houses, a series of designs for typical middle-class Victorian homes, if that is the era they are interested in, might well be just what they want, especially if these are not easily or conveniently available elsewhere.

You could offer facilities for free, but only to those who buy something from you or perhaps opt in to direct email marketing. Perhaps a free safety check with every oil change or signal tester when you buy a satellite dish. Viral emails can be classed as a service, if a light hearted one.

Financial incentives need careful consideration in order not end up on the wrong side of the accounts. The classic ‘buy one, get one free’ is difficult to make a mess of, as is the first order discount but their familiarity might make them less attractive. But air miles might well be a step too far. Loyalty programmes can be very useful in keeping that most valuable asset, the regular customer and can be a target for the newcomer.

Prize draws are everyone’s cup of tea. The betting, gaming and lotteries legislation requires some degree of skill if legal problems are to be avoided. Have your customers in mind when considering the questions. The home ground of which football team includes the Kop: a/ Liverpool, b/ Simon Cowell, or c/ Thursday, might be seen as a comment on how you view your customers. Further, give some thought to the prize. Something of considerable value might well need to stretch over a number of months to regain its cost and your customers might be all Readers Digested out. Conversely, a free pen might not grab the imagination.

In order to gain the attention of a customer and that all important email address, offer them something they really want but which costs you little.

        

Email marketing is the best way to communicate with your subscribers to build strong relations with them. It is very much important the way you communicate with them, which can bring repeat in your business. The communication is effective when you are not trying to ‘fake’ it.

Analyze the emails written to a client compared to the emails written to your friends and family. Notice the casual way of talking when you’re writing to friends and family; while the emails written to your client would be formal and somewhat tensed. You see you are trying to sell to the client and you’d never be talking in a casual way.

Try out by writing an email to a group of friends asking them to check out the hot VPS Hosting Plans you have seen on bodhost.co.uk. Put your affiliate link in the URL and send it to your friends. You will find that most of your friends will open the email from you. They will checkout the hosting plans you are recommending and they will definitely make up their mind to buy it if they want one.

The conversion rate will be high because the way you recommended the product in a casual way will grab their attention. So the point is never sell a product to your subscribers; recommend it in a way that would make them open their wallets and buy the plans.

The fact is that subscribers no matter who they are don’t want to be sold to. They’ll simply whine and unsubscribe instantly if you try to hard sell because they don’t know you in person, hence, they don’t trust you.

So the first and the leading rule is to build trust like you’d build a friendship with a group of people. To build trust, you need to follow these 3 effective email marketing tips.

Never sound like a salesman - Never, ever sound like you’re selling them stuff. You might have experienced this yourself in the real world. What do you do if a person knocks at your door and try to sell you a product right on your doorstep. You’d ignore him and close the door immediately. But when you get a call from your friend about a hot product he purchased today, you’d definitely want to check it out.

Always build trust first - Building trust is a tricky thing. You might wax a lot of people in the process. But don’t give up. If some people unsubscribe from your list, that’s fine. Don’t worry about them. They won’t buy from you no matter what you do. So it’s good to ‘clean’ your list in the process.

One way to build trust is to send product review emails of the famous products in your niche. Don’t become their affiliate in that process. Just give you honest opinion about the products. Give them things of great value. For example, you might have some old report lying waste on your hard drive. Brush it up and edit it accordingly. Remember, it should have good value. Good information.

Communicate in a casual way - Be casual. Communicate as if they are friends with you. Use casual words like “hey check this out” as a subject of the email. Don’t try to increase your conversions by selling hard. Don’t pound them with offers; inform them. Tell them about your stuff. Make them look at your sales page and the sales page will do the conversions. Don’t try to make your email a sales pitch.

Hope this article has been helpful to you and good luck with your email marketing.

        

As the industry is changing as rapidly as Google tweaks their algorithm, it is hard to decide what the most important factors are. The On-site and off-site are the two major factors in SEO which is necessary for every type of website. Normally, most of the webmasters starts with the on-site SEO, because your aim is to get your website recognize by Google. If they don’t, then how are you ever going to rank for a keyword?

The search engine spiders that crawl your E-commerce website will be looking at several different attributes on every page to determine where it needs to go and how relevant it is to specific searches done at Google search engine.

Another factor worth mentioning is a Keyword. What is a Keyword?

A keyword is basically an elaborate name for what people might search for when trying to find your E-commerce website. I am using a Bodhost.co.uk website as an example. People could search for “Web Hosting”, but they might also search for “Cheap Web Hosting”, “VPS Web Hosting” and “UK Web Hosting Service”. All of these would be keywords, or probably more properly could be said to be key phrases.

However, they are generally all referred to simply as keywords. Note that almost all On-site SEO has to do with is placing high-quality keywords throughout your E-commerce website content where search engine robots, spiders, or software might be able to decide what your website is about.

6 On-Site SEO Factors That Can Influence Your SERP Ranking:

* The Title of the Page
* The keywords used in the text on your website
* The keywords are used in H1 Tags
* Keywords used in your domain name
* Keywords used in the URL of a webpage
* Meta Keywords

3 Major Off-Site SEO Factors That Can Improve Your Search Engine Ranking:

Backlinks to Your E-commerce Website

This is without a doubt one of the keys to having your website listed in the search engines results page for specific keywords. Google likes to look at what others are saying about your website to determine what it is about. For example, if someone is a huge fan of a UK Web Hosting, and you provide that service, they may link to your website with “UK Web Hosting” as the text that people would click on to get to your website. This text is called anchor text and Google will see that link as a simple “vote” for your website to appear higher than others for that keyword. In short, these are commonly referred to as backlinks.

Quality of the Websites linking to your Website

Those linking to your website should also have some form of importance. For example, there are many websites with loads of outgoing links to many websites. Google does not want to give these websites as much weight in their “vote” in comparison to a link from Bodhost’s official website or something along those lines.

The Age of Your E-commerce Website

The reason I listed this as an off-site related issue, because it really doesn’t fit in either category. This is a simple issue that the search engines will evaluate. This is not to say that it is the most important factor, but many older websites will naturally rank higher than new websites that have more backlinks.

I am not sure why this occurs, but many would say that it does. As compare to Google, Yahoo definitely puts more weight on this.

        

eBay alternatives do exist!

In fact, there are several viable alternatives to selling on eBay for the ecommerce entrepreneur, and you will probably find them much more seller friendly, besides a lot more economical than eBay.

Before you choose an alternative to eBay, you should first consider the type of product or products you are selling, as different websites are geared toward different types of items.

For example, if your business is dropshipping new books, then Amazon might be a much better marketplace for you than eBay.

If, however, your niche market is vintage items such as clothing or textiles, Amazon wouldn’t work for you because at this time, it doesn’t carry vintage or used clothing. In that case, a different web site such as Bonanzle might work very nicely for you.

Here are four simple steps you can take to find a website that will be a suitable, economical alternative to selling on eBay, and that will enable you to set up and start selling immediately, with a minimum of fuss and bother:

1. Do a Google search for “eBay alternatives” or “online auction sites”. You will discover that your search will return several websites. You need to check them out to see what each has to offer.

2. When visiting each website with an eye for how it would work for you as an alternative to selling on eBay, check to make sure that you would be able to sell your products there.

Browse the categories, read the policies and learn about listing fees and final value fees, membership fees, if any; listing restrictions, listing durations, etc.

3. Once you have chosen a site that seems suitable for the types of items you sell, follow the instructions on the website to join and become a member/seller.

4. Now, simply start listing your items for sale on the new site. Some eBay alternative sites make it especially easy for sellers by allowing you to quickly and easily import your listings from eBay in bulk.

Voila! In only a few moments, you can find great places to list and sell your products besides eBay….choose the one that best suits your needs according to what type of items you sell…..register as a seller, list your items and be ready for business!

If eBay isn’t working for you anymore, not to worry—there is life after eBay and other profitable auction sites just waiting for you to start selling!

        

Anyone looking for information about selling stuff online will likely run into a lot of advice about ebay. After all they are the number one place to sell goods on the internet. One site that is often overlooked but offers opportunity for those who are interested in selling media is amazon.com. Unlike ebay which is auction focused amazon is more marketplace driven. So what do those new to selling on amazon need to know before diving in. The rest of this article will give some pointers.

First of all I already mentioned that amazon is primarily a marketplace. As such people who go to amazon to shop are likely there to find the lowest price on a particular item. During recessions like the current one we are in amazon bargain priced culture actually provides more opportunity for sellers than auction based sites. Below are some tips and strategies that you need to know to succeed as a seller on amazons marketplace.

First of all you have to be able to be very competitive. It is important to be the lowest priced seller or at least in the top two or three. Having a good feedback score does matter on amazon but even more important is price. To be able to have the lowest price on the site you need to have a very low cost structure. That starts with finding goods for little cost. Doing that means finding your product at places like thrift stores and garage sales. Another part of your costs are your packing and shipping costs. I recommend finding a good wholesaler to buy your mailers and all other supplies you need for selling on amazon. I hope this article was helpful for those new to selling on the site.